1447–20.09.1533
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
13.03.1900–18.07.1993
Jean Negulesco
Jean Negulesco (1900–1993) began as a painter: at fifteen he drew a portrait of George Enescu, studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and held exhibitions in New York. In Hollywood he rose from title sketches at Paramount to directing for Warner Bros. and 20th Century-Fox, where he made Johnny Belinda and Three Coins in the Fountain. He spent his last years in Marbella.07.07.1833–22.08.1898
Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops (1833–1898) began in Brussels as a caricaturist for student magazines: a lithograph of a Waterloo medal drew an outcry in France and Belgium. He later moved to Paris, learned etching and made dozens of frontispieces for publishers, among them books by Baudelaire and Barbey d’Aurevilly. He is known for the drawing “Pornocrates” and the cycle “Les Sataniques”.10.02.1848–25.02.1936
Anna Boch
Anna Boch (1848–1936) was the only woman in the Brussels group Les XX and also collected the work of her contemporaries. At the group’s exhibition in 1890 she bought Van Gogh’s “The Red Vineyard”. Artists and musicians gathered at her home in Brussels, while her own landscapes and seascapes moved from Impressionism to a denser, more contrasting manner.14.06.1971–?
Alfred Freddy Krupa
Alfred Freddy Krupa was born in Karlovac in 1971, into a family where his grandfather already painted. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, then worked in Tokyo on a Japanese government scholarship. He works in ink on paper and canvas, issued a New Ink Art manifesto in 1996, illustrates books and takes photographs; his work is in several museum collections.30.09.1972–25.12.2019
Ari Behn
Ari Behn was born in Aarhus, Denmark, to Norwegian parents, and became known in Norway for the short story collection “Sad as Hell” (1999), which sold about 100,000 copies. He wrote novels and a play, made documentary films, hosted television programmes, and from 2013 painted in a neo-expressionist manner. His works were shown in galleries in several countries.10.04.1877–20.08.1959
Alfred Kubin
Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) trained with a photographer and began to draw seriously only in Munich, where he saw the prints of Max Klinger. His ink drawings of nightmares and fantastic creatures made him known as early as the 1900s. In 1909 he published his only novel, “The Other Side”, with his own illustrations; from 1906 he lived at the Zwickledt estate on the River Inn.20.01.1910–03.01.1980
Joy Adamson
Joy Adamson (1910–1980) grew up in Troppau and Vienna, and in Kenya began painting the flowers and trees of East Africa and, on commission from the colonial administration, portraits of people from twenty local tribes. Her international fame came from “Born Free”, the book about the lioness Elsa, whom she and her husband released into the wild. Money from her books went to wildlife protection.01.04.1905–03.01.1988
Gaston Eyskens
Gaston Eyskens (1905–1988) led the Belgian government in 1949–1950, 1958–1961 and 1968–1973. Before politics he was a professor of economics at Leuven. Under him the country went through the Royal Question, the School Pact, the independence of the Belgian Congo and the first state reform, which turned unitary Belgium into a state of communities and regions.10.10.1903–01.06.1983
Prince Charles, Count of Flanders
The younger brother of King Leopold III, Charles was elected regent of Belgium by parliament in September 1944 and exercised the royal powers for more than five years. After his term ended he settled at Raversijde near Ostend and painted portraits and landscapes, signing them “Karel van Vlaanderen”. From 1972 or 1973 he held about twenty exhibitions.05.02.1930–?
Ilon Wikland
Ilon Wikland was born in Tartu in 1930, grew up in Haapsalu and reached Sweden as a refugee at fourteen. She worked with Astrid Lindgren more than any other illustrator, from “Mio, My Son” (1954) to “Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter”. In 2004 she gave about 800 originals to Estonia, and “Ilon’s Wonderland”, a centre devoted to her, opened in Haapsalu.22.01.1872–08.02.1938
Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark
Prince Nicholas, the third son of King George I of Greece, signed his paintings with the pseudonym “Nicolas Leprince”. He helped organise the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, gave drawing and painting lessons in exile after the royal family left Greece in 1917, and returned to Athens in 1936.01.03.1842–04.01.1901
Nikolaos Gyzis
The son of a carpenter from the island of Tinos, Nikolaos Gyzis won a monastery scholarship and went to Munich in 1865, where he lived for most of his life. From the 1880s he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, and his “The Secret School” appeared on the Greek 200-drachma banknote. He painted genre scenes, historical and allegorical compositions, and late religious canvases.23.01.1734–26.03.1804
Wolfgang von Kempelen
Von Kempelen (1734–1804) spent most of his life as a civil servant at the Habsburg court: he managed salt mines, directed building projects and built waterworks. Two machines made him famous: the chess-playing “Turk”, with a man hidden inside, and a speaking machine described in a book of 1791. An early example of the speaking machine is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.24.05.1928–20.11.2016
William Trevor
William Trevor Cox began as a sculptor, carving wooden reliefs for English churches, and became a professional writer only at thirty-six, after winning a prize for his novel “The Old Boys”. He was born in Mitchelstown into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family and spent almost all his life in England, yet considered himself Irish. His short stories made his name and were often compared with Chekhov’s.11.05.1928–21.06.2026
Yaacov Agam
Yaacov Agam (1928–2026) grew up in Rishon LeZion in the family of a rabbi and kabbalist, studied in Jerusalem and Zurich, and from 1951 lived in Paris. In 1955 he took part in the exhibition “Le Mouvement” at the Galerie Denise René, and later made fountains, reliefs and sculptures for public spaces in Paris, Tel Aviv and other cities.26.01.1935–08.06.2022
Paula Rego
Paula Rego (1935–2022) was born in Lisbon, studied in London from the age of seventeen and lived there permanently from 1976. Her paintings, pastels and prints grew out of folk tales, nursery rhymes and literary subjects. Her best-known series are the Dog Women, the Abortion Series and the work made for the National Gallery, where in 1990 she became the first Associate Artist.14.11.1887–25.10.1918
Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso
Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887–1918) began in Paris with architecture and caricatures and ended in the Portuguese countryside with canvases made with sand, collage and trompe-l’oeil. At the 1913 Armory Show in New York he sold seven of the eight pictures he showed. He died at thirty; real recognition came only decades later.20.06.1946–03.10.2021
Lars Vilks
Lars Vilks (1946–2021) built two sculptures in the Kullaberg nature reserve in southern Sweden: Nimis, from driftwood, and Arx, from stone and concrete. Years of legal battles with the authorities became part of the project, and in 1996 he proclaimed the site an independent country, Ladonia. He taught art theory in Oslo and Bergen, and after his drawings of 2007 lived under police protection.24.04.1830–23.04.1889
Princess Eugénie of Sweden
Princess Eugénie of Sweden painted watercolours of court life, modelled figures that were later reproduced in porcelain at the Rörstrand and Gustavsberg factories, and composed songs and piano pieces. In 1873 she was made an honorary member of the Academy of Arts. The money from her work went to orphanages, hospitals and homes for the terminally ill on Gotland and in Stockholm.13.01.1969–?
Genco Gulan
In 1997 Genco Gulan founded the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum as an art project of his own: first in the spirit of Duchamp and Broodthaers, then on the internet. He works with painting, sculpture, installation and new media, has exhibited at the Pera Museum, ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Centre Pompidou, teaches and writes about art.08.10.1948–?
Gottfried Helnwein
Gottfried Helnwein (born 1948) grew up in postwar Vienna and made the wounded, bandaged child the central motif of his work. His hyperrealist watercolours, photographs and actions provoked protests, and in Cologne in 1988 he built a hundred-metre wall of children’s faces. His 2013 retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna drew 250,000 visitors.07.06.1954–?
Jan Theuninck
Jan Theuninck was born in 1954 in Zonnebeke, in West Flanders, and although his native language is Dutch, he writes poetry in French, occasionally in English. His abstract paintings lie between minimalism and monochrome expressionism. In both painting and poetry he returns to the same themes: the Holocaust, colonialism, pacifism.11.12.1953–?